The Bechdel Rule

Alison Bechdel’s watch-or-not test for movies came up here. Now experience the rule itself! (Courtesy of Comics Should Be Good!) Well, everything but the righthand edge of the rule; Blogger is stumping me here.

The rule itself: A movie has to have at least two women, they have to talk to each other, and they have to talk to each other about something besides a man. The Liz Wallace being thanked in panel 1 is the friend of Bechdel’s who came up with the rule.

UPDATE: The cartoon is now a long way down screen. Some thoughts occurred to me.

Second, here are some movies that flunk the Bechdel test: Sunset Boulevard, The Candidate, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Dr. Strangelove (anything by Kubrick, I guess), It Happened One Night, possibly The Women, and any film based on the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. Plus a bunch of others. In Bechdel’s cartoon (still way below) you’ll see that she proposed the test so she could screen out big ’80s blockbusters about rampaging male destruction. It’ll do that, of course, but only along with a lot of other stuff. As a movie-selection tool, the test’s only value is this: it’s a compass pointing away from male-dominated society.

Personally, I’m not trying to get away from such films. What I like about the Bechdel rule is that it’s a quick, on-the-spot demonstration that yes, Hollywood product is male dominated. The movies don’t have to be about manly men doing dangerous things; you can make a movie about career, vanity, and self-deception, a movie with a fantastic part for a woman (all right, I’m talking about Sunset Boulevard), and it’s still going to be written and made by men and aiming at an audience that is at least as male as not. It will be male product, and that fact will show in many ways, a basic one being that the women won’t have much to do that doesn’t involve men. In real life women talk to each other about all sorts of stuff, in movies they don’t, and what happens in between is the movie industry.

In my opening list I threw in Gilbert and Sullivan, so we’re not talking just about movies. I’d guess that a majority of all mediums’ entertainment products would be ruled out under the test — a guess only.

yes. it's not, how i use it, a rule to dictate what movies i'll see, or what's a good movie or a bad movie, or even necessarily a feminist or unfeminist movie (most romantic comedies, in my experience, pass the test & yet many have pretty evil messages).

but it is startling, once you know the rule, to realize how many movies fail it. & how virtually no movies would fail the test if it were about men. that points to the still staggering sexism of our media, & also how blind we are to it, if failing it is "natural" & passing it is "unfairly stringent" (i've seen these arguments on blogs where the test was posted).

i'm not sure that any given movie is "aiming at an audience that is at least as male as not", either. do men really outnumber women by that much, as moviegoers? i think any given movie is "a male product" only insofar as we live in a "male" (ie sexist, where men are the norm & women are a special case) culture. but maybe that is what you were saying.

The Bechdel rule doesn’t tell you whether a given movie is sexist or not, nor whether a given movie is even aimed at women — all women-in-prison movies would qualify, for example, even the most heinous (like Jess Franco’s.) Even a lot of girl-girl porn for guys would technically qualify, I think (there’s often at least some peripheral discussion of each other’s attractions.)

I think it’s even arguable that some movies which fail the test aren’t particularly sexist. The first two Terminator movies…I don’t think Linda Hamilton talks to any other women, but she’s treated pretty respectfully overall as these things go.

But Miriram’s right; it’s striking how few cultural products take female relationships into account. I think the reason for that has a lot to do with the way patriarchy works. Negotiating masculinity is really important; male-male ties are how power gets apportioned. Those relationships establish external pecking order and internal identities in a way which is culturally important. Femininity is a lot less valued or culturally interesting. What women say to each other matters a lot less; femininity’s only really important insofar as men possess it or examine it; what women talk at amongst themselves just doesn’t advance the plot. (Unless they’re talking about men.)

And so, yeah, I don’t think it’s that the audience for movies is more likely to be men than women as much as it is that the culture is still patriarchal in a lot of ways, and narratives for (especially) men and (even) women tend to reflect that.

Movie audiences aren’t more male than female…but more movies are made for men, with the assumption that women will tag along. Of course, as Miriam points out, the movies made for women (romantic comedies, etc.) are often also sexist.

There is a market for movies that meet the Bechdel rule, though. Think of the huge success of the Sex and the City movie…but it is a market that is not tapped all that frequently,